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Four years before I was born, during a period of unique planetary alignment, two room-sized contraptions were launched into space on indefinite, infinite trajectories. Not really aimed at anything, really, but aimed to pass near some things and photograph them, and then keep moving. They’re Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and since I first learned about them, in middle school, I’ve been fascinated.

Here’s a list of things about Voyager that make me all gooey and idealistic inside:

1. They have no destination. They just go … away. Out there. Way, out there.
Eternally out there unless it accidentally hits something. What foresight, to plan how to shoot something out so that it can pass everything and not hit stuff so it can just keep going.

Voyager 1 passed Jupiter in 1979, and Saturn in 1980, and then flew past Titan (Saturn’s humongo moon 50% bigger in diameter than our moon and something like 80% more massive). Titan’s gravity pulled it out of a path where it would pass Pluto to photograph closely. in 1990, it had photographed everything, and it is the farthest thing we’ve shot out there that can talk to us. It’s the fastest probe and nothing out there right now will ever pass it. And right now, it’s leaving our solar system.

Voyager 2 passed Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus then Neptune. It discoered Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, and more information about why it’s blue. In 2007, it passed the heliosheath, and in 2010 was twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

2. They carry stuff meant to be found by extraterrestrial beings of other worlds. And who picked out this stuff? Carl Sagan. The “stuff” is carried on a gold phonograph record (don’t worry, the probe also carries a record player).

“This spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet,” Sagan said.

It carries recordings of greetings in 55 languages, animal sounds, photos of mathematical and scientific ideas, people, animals, food, music by Stravinsky, Mozart, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. On the cover are diagrams explaining how to play the record, as well as a map of pulsars showing where our sun is. And a drawing of a hydrogen atom in two states to show the time scale used.

And the opening line, from then-president Jimmy Carter, is eloquent and simple: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

What Sagan said is right. The message of hopefulness and optimism, opportunity and excitement is something amazing and beautiful about our culture. About what it is to be a human citizen of this planet. If I think about it too hard, I feel like crying.

NASA and Sagan knew there was an incredibly small chance actual extraterrestrial beings would find and hear this recording but they did it anyway. They did it anyway. They chose to do something extra, something more, because of the hopeful, uniting message it gives.

That’s how I think about all of NASA: they did it anyway. Building rockets was dangerous and killed people. Sending humans out there into that bleak mystery was terrifying and expensive and took the combined efforts of thousands of people, working hard and at the highest levels of thinking, engineering and technology at the time. But they did it anyway. The moon was out there, so they went. And it took years of planning and testing and retesting and exceptional execution but more than anything it took the willingness to try to go. To do the hard work. To do whatever would take, without knowing what exactly that would entail, to achieve something incredibly idealistic and indulgent. And they did it. Despite everything, they did it.

3. Last year, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the company that basically does all NASA R&D, where my aunt’s dad works) revealed that a bit had been flipped in the transmission from Voyager 2. One single binary piece of computer code, which could be represented as 1 or 0, had changed. What had happened?

Was this an alien race’s peaceful, non-destructive way to say hi? Was this something else? Actually, it was nothing, but for a few days, before JPL was able to reset it, there was a sense of fantastical wonder, not just from the possibilities, but also the excitement and potential of not knowing.

You know the feeling you get when you read a mystery, or watch a good thriller, and there’s a feeling in the not-knowing of excitement and anticipation and knowing that SOMETHING is coming but you don’t know what yet, and it’s … well, it’s something. And nothing else does it. And for a little bit, that wonder has been able to captivate our country, our planet, all of us, and there’s something to be said about that. Some credit to be given for captivating five billion people with just the simple idea of going out there.

So, recently, some of my “crazy, backwoods, Southern-person views” were called into question. I argued as best as I could, but without research (the debater’s best friend) I couldn’t convince my discussion-partners of my point. Now I have researched. Though I’m sure nothing will change their minds that they’re right and I’m wrong, I at least can say I have a well-developed argument.

My position:
I think American citizens should be allowed to own and use guns. I do not think that most gun-control efforts would work to reduce the amount of violent gun crimes in this country, and I think that any revenue and time from abandoning said gun-control efforts would be better spent in cultural and educational ways to reduce violent crimes of all kinds.

Yeah, I like guns. I like guns because I like freedom and personal responsibility. I like guns because I like the first amendment and my protection to say what I want. I like the third and fourth amendments for protecting my home and privacy, the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth for giving me a fair trial and protection from excessive punishment.

I would also like to point out that I do not own a gun. I have fired guns recreationally, and in my mother and stepfather’s home, I know where a loaded handgun is kept in case I need to defend myself against an intruder when I’m there.

My supporting research:

First, the text, “the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” By the governing document of our country, citizens’ rights to keep guns and use guns can’t be challenged.

Second, I previously had unrealistic ideas of how many people die in gun-homicides per year. I downloaded a complete copy of the National Vital Statistics Report on Death for 2007 (link is a PDF) (a lengthy, serious document chronicling all causes of death of the 2,423,712 persons who were reported to have died in the U.S. in 2007). On the front page, the 15 leading causes of death are listed, and right there, at No. 15, is Assault (homicide).

To me, as probably the simplest, most efficient way to kill another human, if one were to desire, would be to get a gun and shoot them. So, I made an assumption that yeah, I guess there must be a lot of people getting shot. For the past few years I’ve lived in cities that, for some reason, have higher-than-average levels of gun-related crimes (Savannah, Ga., Washington D.C. and Atlanta), and I’m constantly flooded with local news coverage of gun crimes and gun homicides. In my head, people were killing each other with guns a lot. If I had been asked to estimate, just off the top of my head, I probably would have guessed closer to 750,000 or a million people died from gunshots per year in the U.S. And dang, would I have been wrong.

And I kept reading. And I learned I didn’t make a really smart assumption. If you total the numbers for deaths from Accidental discharge of firearms, Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms, Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms and Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent, you get 30,873 deaths from guns. That’s still a lot. But the breakdown is surprising, or at least, it was surprising to me.

• Accidental Discharge of Firearms: 613
• Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms: 17,352
• Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms: 12,632
• Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent: 276

I was surprised that the number of gun-related suicides was so high, but more surprised that the number of gun-related homicides was so low.

(Of course, in reading the report, I saw some other interesting big, and small, numbers. 46,844 people died from motor-vehicle accidents, 562,875 from “malignant neoplasms” aka cancer, 30 from Salmonella, 2,644 from malnutrition, 411 from influenza, 769 from pregnancy and childbirth. For context, I tried to find other causes of death that caused a number of deaths near the number of deaths caused by gun homicides; roughly, these included HIV, esophageal, stomach, kidney, brain, bladder and ovarian cancers, multiple immunoproliferative cancers, and emphysema. Most of the heart diseases kill way more, most other things kill way fewer.)

What I’m saying with all these numbers is, and this is just as cold as it will sound, because it’s simply based on columns of figures and not thinking of those figures as human beings and sons and mothers and wives and grandchildren, is, on the whole, if you’re going to die, it’s not really likely it’ll be from being shot with a gun. And if you are shot with a gun and die from it, it’s more likely you do it to yourself.

There are a lot of things out there killing people we should be more furious and more outraged about than guns. Personally, those 2,644 who starved to death makes me pretty furious. People dying of curable diseases (pneumonia, hernias, tuberculosis, meningitis, syphilis, measles, etc.) makes me furious. And honestly, both make me more furious than even my imagined-number of gun-homicide deaths could make me.

Next, not a lot of guns actually are used in crimes. Here’s an interesting number from the National Academy of Science. Of the approximately 70 million handguns in the U.S. (in 2004) only about 7,500 a year are used in gun crimes. That’s .011 percent of handguns. Which means that 99.989 percent of handguns in the U.S. are never used to commit a crime. Never.

In debate, I would call this “no link,” because statistically, most handguns aren’t used in crimes. If you took all of these 70 million handguns away from their owners, you’d only be getting rid of about 7,500 guns that actually were used illegally.

Plus, think about the effort involved there. The effort to collect those 70 million handguns would be a colossal undertaking that would probably cost a lot of money and a lot of time. However, to collect just 7,500 guns wouldn’t take so long or cost so much, and really, if your goal is to prevent crimes, only 7,500 handguns are used in crimes in a year. Shouldn’t you just focus the utmost effort on just getting those 7,500 guns that are used in crimes, and not all 70 million? Wouldn’t that solve the problem AND have the added bonus of being very efficient?

OK, next research point. In the friendly discussion I had about my “crazy” views on guns, it was suggested that guns should be taken away from people, and not able to be purchased legally. High-profile voluntary gun buyback programs have been put on across the country and statistically, well, they sucked. People gave up their old and broken guns, and then took the cash and bought newer, nicer guns.

But what has worked to deter gun crimes? Police and penalties. Cities that put lots more cops in locations where lots of people got shot saw gun homicide rates plummet (re: Boston’s 1996 Project Cease Fire). Likewise, places that made crimes with guns highly punishable, more than just a regular crime (i.e. robbery vs. robbery with a gun), saw fewer gun crimes.

So, bottom line, based on proven attempts to deter gun crimes: taking away guns didn’t work, but preventing and prosecuting gun crimes worked. Wouldn’t it make more logical sense to then channel problem-solving efforts related to gun crime into the proven methods of reducing gun crime, instead of the wasteful methods that are proven not to reduce gun crime?

Here are two more statements, ones that don’t have as much research, but are to be considered, I think:

• Criminals do illegal things (you know, like crimes). If we make having a gun a crime, I doubt it will matter much to a criminal. He/she is already going to commit a robbery or a homicide or whatever crime, so I doubt he/she would gasp “Oh! But getting a gun is illegal!” Plus, there are already illegal ways of getting guns, and guess what, people get guns illegally. People also get guns legally, and then use them illegally to kill people. Obviously, the legality here is not the issue.
• This is just my opinion, and I didn’t research it, but I think making guns illegal would just make them some kind of worse fetish property. It would raise the glamour level of guns. It would make people who had guns somehow sexier, cooler, and then it would make gun crimes seem that way too.

Similar research has been done on other stuff like this. Like, kids who were raised in strict homes and not allowed sweets, or had big stigmas about alcohol, go off to college and eat junk food and get fat, or binge drink. Reactionary. Push one way and it only makes the other way happen.

Conclusion:
I think making guns illegal would be a waste of considerable time, money and effort. I also think that using that considerable time, money and effort on things that deter gun crimes would be an infinitely better solution to any gun-related-crime problem than criminalizing simple gun ownership.

OK, so, sure, call me a crazy, red-state-dwelling weirdo. I believe what I think on this subject is practical, rational and logical. I also have plenty of ideas and opinions that would not fit my crazy, red-state-dwelling weirdo persona (ask me how I feel about legislating my uterus, or about my public school education, or school prayer, or school vouchers, or, I dunno, like a million other things that explain why I’m registered to vote democrat in a state that never does).

If I want a gun, if my friend or mother or neighbor or son or daughter or husband or wife or whatever wants a gun, they should decide for themselves if having one is right for them, not the government. Likewise, the government should not take broad, inaccurate generalizations to make legislation to remove freedoms under the false guise of personal safety. (Plus, if it turns out anything like how airport security did, it’ll be totally FUBAR and won’t really make us feel that much safer.)

OK, New York. You and I are fucking finished.

This is the last straw: A bus driver dies and sits in an idling bus at Port Authority for five hours.

Before this, I read a story about how the city uses subway cars to transport garbage sometimes. Cars in trains that are IN SERVICE at the time. The story included a quote, from a union president, that ends ” … if you walk close to a bag, a rat could jump out right on top of you.”

And then, the one that started it all. The Chinese-food sex doll story.

Now, I realize that things like this probably happen everywhere, and that there’s probably a Chinese-food sex doll right in the very building I’m in while I type this. And I realize that people die all the time (and probably yes, some die at work, and some people work driving buses, so I get that this whole scenario isn’t astronomically mathematically impossible). And, you know, I believe in rats, and yeah, I understand trash has to get moved around somehow.

As a child, I dreamed of living in New York and being a writer. Frittering away on a typewriter and smoking on my fire escape. I didn’t hit the lottery at 11, though, so that dream became financially infeasible. Now though, I mean, if I wanted to badly enough, I could get my shit together and move to New York and work and go to parties and do New York things.

But I’m not going to. Because, seriously, New York, you’re disgusting.